Gary C
Veteran Member
With retirement looming (3 years, 4 months and 11 days !), I am looking forward to plenty of tinkering time and have been building up as many different machines to keep me interested.
However a chance reading of some local(ish) news brought to light someone attempting to get a museum off the ground. After some effort he has managed to secure space in a Victorian mill which is being converted into a community heritage centre and already there is a pile of vintage computers under tarp awaiting the day the North West Computer Museum opens.
So, after a chat I have joined the team
Last week we finally started to go through the collection, powering up machines to ascertain what is working, what is restorable and what is to become 'spares'. You only need to spend so much time plugging in BBC micro's and watching RIFA's burn before you decided positive action really is the right thing to do, so bags of spare RIFA's are now on the menu.
One BBC master decided to blow its RIFA and the PSU with it. Its a strange fault as I suspect its taken out a resistor somewhere because one of the capacitors retains a 160V charge for quite some time after turning it off, and guess how I know.....twice (ouch). While the PSU seems to have many similarities with the BBC unit, there appears to be no drawings available so its going to be a slow tracing and drawing out before I start to diagnose....love it
But, in the last 5 weeks I have been working 60 hour weeks with most of these shifts on nights so the computers have had to take a back seat, yawn.
At least we have both reactors at power now
BTW, if anyone has any donations to a new UK museum, let me know
However a chance reading of some local(ish) news brought to light someone attempting to get a museum off the ground. After some effort he has managed to secure space in a Victorian mill which is being converted into a community heritage centre and already there is a pile of vintage computers under tarp awaiting the day the North West Computer Museum opens.
So, after a chat I have joined the team
Last week we finally started to go through the collection, powering up machines to ascertain what is working, what is restorable and what is to become 'spares'. You only need to spend so much time plugging in BBC micro's and watching RIFA's burn before you decided positive action really is the right thing to do, so bags of spare RIFA's are now on the menu.
One BBC master decided to blow its RIFA and the PSU with it. Its a strange fault as I suspect its taken out a resistor somewhere because one of the capacitors retains a 160V charge for quite some time after turning it off, and guess how I know.....twice (ouch). While the PSU seems to have many similarities with the BBC unit, there appears to be no drawings available so its going to be a slow tracing and drawing out before I start to diagnose....love it
But, in the last 5 weeks I have been working 60 hour weeks with most of these shifts on nights so the computers have had to take a back seat, yawn.
At least we have both reactors at power now
BTW, if anyone has any donations to a new UK museum, let me know